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Locational Privacy

Locational Privacy

Modern communications mean most individuals today walk around with a beacon that transmits their location. Mobile phones register to a nearby tower as the owner moves through space and the phone company can collect that data in real time or retrospectively to physically place the phone with varying degrees of accuracy. Companies can also determine the owner of every handset within range of a particular tower. GPS enabled phones enable far more precise location placement. Many cars now have GPS devices installed some of which transmit the vehicle’s location to a centralized service. As the devices get cheaper and smaller law enforcement agencies can more easily attach GPS trackers to cars and individuals enabling precise round-the-clock surveillance without ever leaving the precinct. Location-based services including maps of nearby restaurants friend finders and other social networks collect location data as part of providing the service or for contextual advertising.

EFF is fighting to protect the privacy and prevent the misuse of this data that users of phones GPS transmitters and location-based services leak to providers and to the government. In our cell tracking and GPS tracking cases we advocate that the law protect this information by requiring police to get a search warrant before obtaining this sensitive data. We also work to ensure that location based service providers don’t abuse the information they collect on their customers or hand it off to other companies or the police without consent or probable cause.

Last year, the Supreme Court issued a landmark opinion in a case we’ve written about a lot, called Carpenter v. United States, ruling that the Fourth Amendment protects data generated by our phones called historical cell-site location information or CSLI. The Court recognized that CSLI creates a “detailed chronicle...

San Francisco—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today released a comprehensive report that identifies and explains the hidden technical methods and business practices companies use to collect and track our personal information from the minute we turn on our devices each day.Published on Cyber Monday, when millions of consumers are shopping...

San Francisco – On Thursday, Oct. 23, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) will urge the California Court of Appeal to reverse a lower court and hold that law enforcement use of data gathered from automated license plate reader (ALPR) systems is a search that requires a warrant. ALPRs are computer-controlled...